Every hour of every day, 300 children die because of malnutrition. It's an underlying cause of more than a third of children's deaths – 2.6 million every year. But it's not recorded on death certificates and, as a result, it's not effectively addressed.

Children who are malnourished are weaker and more prone to suffering from a deadly cycle of illness and disease. And for the children who do survive to reach their fifth birthday, long-term malnutrition causes devastating and irreversible damage. Lack of nutritious food means their bodies and brains don't develop properly. At least 170 million children are affected by this condition known as stunting.

Stunting not only means they're too short for their age – they're likely to enrol at school later and to do less well academically. Childhood malnutrition can lessen productivity – stunted children are predicted to earn an average of 20% less.

This crisis is not new. While the world has been experiencing years of financial turmoil, pervasive long-term malnutrition is slowly eroding the foundations of the global economy by destroying the potential of millions of children. Malnutrition is undermining economic growth and reducing the productivity of people trying to work their way out of poverty in the world's poorest countries. It's estimated that 3–6% of the national income of a country can be lost to malnutrition.

Progress on improving malnutrition has been pitifully slow for 20 years. But a combination of global trends – climate change, volatile food prices, economic uncertainty, and demographic shifts – is putting future progress on stunting at risk.

For this article you should explore why children are chronically malnourished. What is preventing parents from being able to feed their children enough nutritious foods? What is life like for a stunted child? How does stunting affect the family? The community? The country? You should also look at what can be done to tackle long-term malnutrition.

Using your own research and investigative methods, you are invited to delve into these issues and make the stories behind them come to life. Make sure you use relevant statistics to support your article.